5 years ago, the worse news arrived to FEAR Combat: The FEAR Master server was Shut Down.
Servers restarting couldn’t come back online. Players searching servers got no response.
The FEAR Community team, by then moslty <eAu>Phreeze and me, =MXT=Fred.cpp were getting ready for this scenario for some time, but we were still not ready.
This nightmare scenario, or like I use to call It, the Ultimate FEAR Fate Event, was previously predicted by Phreee to happen before 2012 end, we were not sure when. Maybe De 15th, we hoped.
I was very optimistic, because I had the FEAR Combat Launcher almost ready, but with important features missing and had to work fast. He was already working on a new Master Server; something that exceded my wildest dreams, but I was condifent he could do “something”.
When that 5/12/2012 day we lost the official master server, lot of people quit. They didn’t know we released, that night the FEAR Combat Launcher, that allowed people to connect to the still running servers.
During the next days Phreeze, that already had made the SEC2 servers support both old and new CKeys, made SEC2 allow new servers to start, without the old master server.
Finally only a month later, he released a Patch that allowed both client and servers go back to normal, making the FEAR Launcher not needed anymore.
A huge task that I want to acknowledge today. Without It, It’s almost sure there would be no servers running.
here is an extract of the about page of this site.
Eventually, more people joined this effort. Thanks for continue with us, to all players, server admins and supporters.
See you ingame.

A full changelog will be provided later, but for now, mostly includes fixing exploits and bugs, as well as antihack meaures for the latest available hacks, specially those focused on crashing servers and kick out other players.
As usual, we encourage server admins to update and provide feedback to avoid when possible, false positives and keep servers clean.
As usual, get them in the Downloads section:

Final Update: We have included the latest versions in the download section. Currently Beta 2 and 3 for Linux and Windows. We will just continue uploading the latest dev versions, but they are stable enough for use and include patches for latest hacks availables; we focus on the more damaging ones, like Crash, immortal and invisible players. Check them periodically.

Update 2: Windows version updated to 2.0.5 Alpha 3; fixing more false positives and adding detection of more hack events.

Update: Windows version updated to 2.0.5 Alpha 2; fixing false positives and adding a couple extra features under test.

We are happy to announce the inmediate availability of the SEC2 2.0.4 and 2.0.5 update for FEAR Combat Dedicated Servers.
There are open beta testing versions, so we encourage server admins to keep an eye on their servers and report issues.

4 years ago, 5th December 2012: GameSpy shut down the FEAR Master Server.

That day (late night), we released the FEAR Launcher as a temporal workaround to continue playing.

One month later, the updated SEC2 version was launched, connecting to the new FEAR Master Server (hosted by FEAR-Community.org), and fixing the ingame Functionality to host, search and connect servers.

“We continue working in the maintenance, bugfix and promotion of the game, by providing downloads for the gamefiles and Game Keys, tutorials, tips and support.